and to embody that principle in the tariff, gave the Conservatives an opportunity. Acting in the spirit of opportunism, Macdonald promptly committed the Conservative party to protection.

Macdonald and the Conservatives thus thrust a new issue into Dominion politics, an issue on which the two parties were to be sharply divided for the next eighteen or nineteen years. The general election of 1878 was fought on what in Canada for forty years has been known as the National Policy. It was the first election in Canada, or in the British North-American provinces, at which protection was the issue. The Liberals were overwhelmingly defeated. Macdonald again became Premier; and he held that office until his death in 1891.

The first National Policy tariff, with protectionist duties ranging from 25 to 35 per cent., was enacted in 1879, a year after the return of the Conservatives to power. From that time, the Conservative party had the unwavering support of all the interests, industrial and financial, that directly or indirectly derive advantage from National Policy tariffs. Despite the fact that there were general elections in 1882, 1887, and 1891, the Liberal party was continuously in opposition until 1896. In the Parliament of 1878-1882, the Liberals, then led by Mackenzie, numbered only 69, in a House of Commons containing 206 members. Mackenzie, who among other distinctions had that of being the only Premier of Canada to decline a knighthood, soon wearied of the uphill task of leading the Opposition, almost a forlorn hope in those years. He retired in 1882, and was succeeded by Edward Blake, who was leader until after the general election of 1887. Blake then retired, because of ill-health. At a caucus of the Liberal members, whose numbers had been increased to 87 at the last election, Laurier was chosen as Blake's successor. He had been elected leader of the French-Canadian group of the Liberal party in the House of Commons in the first session of the 1878 Parliament.

It has always been the rule at Ottawa to elect party leaders in a caucus. In Canada the caucus is older than Confederation. In the course of a parliamentary session at Ottawa, much business comes before the caucus of each party. The Government unfolds its legislative

policy and plans in caucus; and in caucus the Opposition discusses legislation proposed by the Government, and decides on its policy and House of Commons tactics in respect to such legislation. Each party, when in opposition, chooses its leader in caucus; and generally it may be said that the caucus is as firmly established and as frequently in service as it is at Washington.

Laurier, on Blake's retirement (1887), was not anxious to change his position as leader of the French-Canadian group for that of leader of the Opposition. He was aware that it was an excessively difficult position for a French-Canadian. He pleaded first the condition of his health, which from the time when he removed from Montreal to Arthabaska had never been robust. Next, he advanced the fact, already well known, that he was not a man of independent means. Finally, he agreed to accept the leadership for a session, pending an improvement in Blake's health. But Blake was not willing to resume the position. In the early days of the session of 1888, Laurier was re-elected by the Liberal caucus ; and thereafter his leadership of the party, whether it was in opposition or in power, was unquestioned. There were, moreover, no divisions in the party until the question of Conscription came before Parliament in the session of 1917.

During the long period of eighteen years through which the Liberals were in opposition, only two questions which have any large place in the political history of the Dominion occupied for any considerable time the attention of Parliament. One was the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the policy of the Macdonald Government in regard to that undertaking; the other was the so-called National Policy, with its tariff protection to Canadian manufacturers, and (after 1883) bounties from the Dominion Treasury in aid of the iron and steel industry in Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ontario.

At every session from 1878 to 1885 there were long and often acrimonious debates in the House of Commons on the first of these questions. There were Liberals, of whom Cartwright was the most prominent, who were opposed to the Canadian Pacific as planned and supported by the Conservative Government. These Liberals held that a less costly scheme could be devised to fulfil the

conditions made with British Columbia when that remote and isolated province agreed to come into Confederation. It was a conviction with these members of the House that the Canadian Pacific Railway could never pay; that the Company would become bankrupt; and that the Government would be deeply involved in the failure of the undertaking. Laurier never seems to have gone as far as this in his opposition to the scheme, but he was opposed to the land grants, to the subsidies, and also to the section in the Act which exempted the Company for many years from taxation of its lands and its railway properties. The railway was, however, made; and its success justified the foresight of its promoters.

From 1879 to 1896 the one continuing cause of contention was the National Policy tariff. The Liberals were not free-traders; they always agreed that there must be duties on imports in order to raise revenue. What they objected to was the fiscal system established by Macdonald and the Conservatives in 1879, which was so framed as to afford protection to Canadian industries. Their alternative policy was a fiscal system, with duties on imports devised solely for the raising of revenue, and with no concern on the part of the Government for the interests of Canadian manufacturers. They condemned protection on the ground that it corrupted politics, fostered the growth of trusts and combinations to advance prices, increased the cost of living, retarded immigration, and was responsible for the large and continuing exodus to the United States of native-born Canadians, and also of new-comers from the United Kingdom.

At no time during Laurier's career was he regarded as an authority on trade or commerce, or on the details and operation of tariffs. These were not subjects to which he applied his mind, either when in Opposition or as head of the Government. In Opposition, from 1878 to 1896, Cartwright and Mills, who had both been members of the Mackenzie Administration of 1874-1878, were the foremost authorities on trade, tariffs, bounties, and reciprocity. When the Liberals were in power, Laurier left the details of tariff and bounty enactments, as well as of reciprocity agreements with France and the United States, almost exclusively to his subordinates, H. S. Fielding, Cartwright, and Paterson.

Laurier seldom intervened in debates on tariffs and bounties after the Liberal party, in April 1897, had accepted the National Policy of the Conservatives and, with singular completeness, abandoned or repudiated the fiscal principles advocated by Liberals in Canada from the enactment of the Cayley tariff in 1858 to the Ottawa Conference of 1893 and the general election of 1896. But between 1878 and 1896 he frequently took part in tariff debates in the House, and also made many speeches against the National Policy in the constituencies. In these speeches he invariably confined himself to general principles and broad statements, which, however, made it clear that the principle of protection, and the corruption and exploitation which usually develop when it is embodied in fiscal systems, were to him accursed things. In and out of Parliament, he denounced protection in all its aspects, in terms as vigorous as were ever used by Cobden and Bright, by Peel, Gladstone, Russell, and Grey, by President Cleveland and President Wilson; or, to come to more recent times, by 'The GrainGrowers' Guide' of Winnipeg and The Farmers' Sun' of Toronto, the chief organs of the agrarian movement* of the present day.

At the National Liberal Conference, held at Ottawa, in June 1893, one of the strongest of many speeches against the National Policy was made by Laurier, who as leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons issued the call for the Conference, and presided over its three days' deliberations. The memorable Ottawa programme, modelled to some degree on the Newcastle programme of the Liberal party in England, was framed at this Conference, and was widely promulgated in anticipation of a general election that was expected to come in 1895 but did not come until June 1896. It was

This movement, which in 1920 is represented by an independent group of nine members in the House of Commons at Ottawa, and also by a majority of the members of the Legislature of Ottawa, had its origin as a political movement ten years ago. It developed as a movement in Dominion, as distinct from provincial, politics, out of the pronounced and continuing hostility of grain-growers of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, and of farmers in the provinces east of the Great Lakes, to the high protectionist tariffs and the system of lavish bounties to the iron and steel industry, for which the Liberal Government of 1896-1911 was responsible.

in this programme of 1893 that the Liberal party of Canada, as a Dominion-wide organisation, defined its attitude towards the National Policy of the Conservatives. The Liberal party, it is well to point out, did not promise to open the ports by abolishing all import duties. Import duties have been continuously levied in Canada since 1846, when, by the Enabling Act of the Imperial Parliament, the Legislatures of the old British North-American provinces were empowered to enact their own tariffs. In the Ottawa Liberal programme, there was no promise to establish free trade as it existed at that time in the United Kingdom. Exigencies of revenue made impossible any such sweeping reform of the fiscal system, as it had existed since 1879; but the party gave an unequivocal pledge to the electorate that it would, if returned to power, eliminate the principle of protection from the fiscal system of the Dominion. With this object a widely-extended propaganda programme was carried on during the next three years. Laurier, as leader of the Opposition, was at the height of his popularity, and spoke frequently in the constituencies. In 1894 he went as far afield as Winnipeg, and it was in that city that he held protection up to odium as a form of slavery.

There was no surprise in Canada, not even among Ministers at Ottawa, at the success of the Liberal party at the general election of 1896. The party was ably led. Laurier was popularly regarded as the Gladstone of the Dominion. Cartwright had a strong hold on Ontario. Mr Sifton (now Sir Clifford Sifton) was then a power in Manitoba. The late Israel Tarte, editor of a FrenchCanadian weekly newspaper of wide circulation, was Laurier's lieutenant in Quebec; and 'down by the sea,' in the Maritime Provinces, Mr W. Blair, Premier of New Brunswick, Mr Fielding, then Premier of Nova Scotia, and Mr Davies, an ex-Premier of Prince Edward Island, were acceptable and able leaders. Moreover, the three years' campaign in support of the Ottawa programme infused more enthusiasm into the Liberal party than had existed at any time since Confederation, or has existed at any time since 1896.

The Conservative party, on the other hand, had manifestly been running to seed since the death of